That intolerable silence

The blog has been quiet lately, and I’m sure a few people are wondering what hole I’ve managed to fall into. A friend once accused me of being a compulsive blogger, needing some sort of intervention and a 12-step program, but none of my friends seemed to care to stop me. So what has kept me quiet for so long lately?

It’s just life. A couple of weeks ago I was wrestling with my motivation to solve a giant problem, one of those huge problems that can’t even be fully understood at the outset, like a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. I’m talking about my very slow-progressing Airstream maintenance book, which I think is going into its third year of “work.”

I have to put “work” in quotes because I can’t honestly use that term to describe the herky-jerky progress I was making for the first two years, interspersed by long period of contemplation and (let’s be honest) distraction. Like the massive jigsaw puzzle, I had found all the easy parts and put them together, leaving a giant framework with 4,900 pieces yet to go. This was a motivation-killer.

I mention this because you might think motivation comes easy to me. I don’t talk about my failures enough (people complain it’s depressing). I wrestle with things like every human being does, and there was a long period in which it seemed this project might be just a bit more than I was equipped to complete. Failure WAS an option, and always is an option even if you like to pretend it’s not, because sometimes in failure you can learn something that will help you succeed next time. Like, “don’t take on a 200 page book project if you really don’t have time for it.”

But it’s harder to abandon a project of one’s own design. After all, who or what can you honestly blame for the failure? It was a jail of my own making and I’d told too many people about it, so I kept plugging away, adding a figurative puzzle piece every week or two, and then suddenly a wonderful thing happened. It was that magical moment known to all writers of long texts and jigsaw puzzle fanatics alike. I could see for the first time the beautiful picture that my puzzle would eventually form. Better yet, it was all so obvious now. I knew exactly what I needed to do, and without any motivational struggle at all I found myself gleefully opening up the document and adding text at every opportunity.

Suddenly I was finding time to write after dinner, before breakfast, between phone calls. The first day after the breakthrough I added three pages of text to a 30 page document. The next day I added five pages. The next, 10 pages. By the end of the week the project that took over two years to grow to 30 pages had doubled in size to 60. It was almost worth waiting two years to have that experience. Breakthroughs like that feel great.

Alas, my next act was to get sick with a virus, which has cost me a week of productivity already and will probably take another week to clear up fully. I stopped working on the book because it took all of my virus-limited brainpower to just keep the basic operations going (keep in mind, I’m still TBM so I’ve got to do things like grocery shopping and laundry in addition to moving the Winter issue of Airstream Life ahead). Now, I’ve got to fly up to Oregon to help Brett run Alumafandango, so there’s another big hiatus in the book project ahead.

This has led to the intolerable silence of the blog. I make no apologies, as we aren’t actively Airstreaming at the moment and TBM’s adventures have been sadly muted, but I thought you should know that I haven’t abandoned you. No, quite the opposite, I’m plotting all kinds of things to talk about in the future. I will be blogging from Alumafandango as much as time allows over the coming week, and upon returning I’ll have just about two weeks to get all my TBM-decadence done, so that should be fun. I already had a bacon-wrapped Sonoran hotdog but that’s just a warm-up for the real goodies…

Just finished reading Phillip Caputo’s book about his travels in his Airstream. Your name was mentioned and after a few moments, I realized why the name was familiar. Although I do not have an Airstream, I have been reading and enjoying your blog for several years. Keep up the good work!